Home/2018/November/8/Causes and Effect of Job Stress and Coping on Performance and Psychological Well-being among the Agricultural Research Sector Employees: An Empirical Study Using Multinomial Logistic Regression Approach

Causes and Effect of Job Stress and Coping on Performance and Psychological Well-being among the Agricultural Research Sector Employees: An Empirical Study Using Multinomial Logistic Regression Approach

This manuscript reports the results of our study to assess the influence of stress due to job, strategies adopted for coping the stress, their association, and effect on performance and psychological well-being of agricultural research sector (ARS) employees. A survey of 700 staff working in the ARS in Hyderabad Metro, consisting of 360 women and 340 men were carried out. The 14 independent job stress components, harassment, role ambiguity, psychological factors, peer support, workload, co-workers, role conflict, career, physiological factors, behavioral factors, job control and social support, strategies of coping both the approach & avoidance strategies on dependent factors Performance and Psychological well-being of the agricultural research sector employees were estimated. The Cronbach’s alpha value for the whole sample is 0.87, and C-alpha values for the job stress components and outcome factors performance and psychological well-being ranged between 0.70-0.81. The odds ratios (ORs) were measured to calculate the level of relation of job stress, coping methods, relationship with performance and psychological well-being of ARS staff. The age and gender differences were also studied.

The job stress or employment stress, a silent killer is extensively accepted problem by the social scientists, health specialists and all organizations including industry, research, information technology, IT enabled services. Job stress poses significant effect on well-being of an employee at personal level which leads to, low efficiency, disinterest to work, no keenness to learn new things and develop new avenues and thus the effect on performance of the employees (Cooper and Marshal, 1978). Hans Selye (1956) an Endocrinologist from Austria first presented the idea of stress in the area of life sciences. The word stress has several meanings and defined differently as per the related subjects – stress defined as external energy or force in machine engineering (Pestonjee 1999). Researchers in early days has difficult and “stressful” time as the concept or word was entered into the vernacular during 1970s. The researchers, psychologists, health professionals have their own definition for the term “stress”. Stress is a demanding or threating situation placed on individual (Kahn et. a.1964). The job stress viewed as, that a nature of the job that hurt individual resulting a mismatch between the abilities of a person, and requirements for carrying out the job (French and Caplan, 1970). Hans Selye (1976) defined it as “unspecific response of the body to any demand for change”. The stress is a discomfort causing threat. Selye subsequently created a new concept, stressor, and stress is a reaction of an individual to a stressor. Stress is a “physical, mental, or emotional strain or tension”.

Discussion and Conclusions

The results are in line with the Supran Kumar Sharma, Jyoti Sharma, and Arti Devi (2012), Kumar, K.S. and Madhu(2012), (Prasad et. al. 2016), Waghachavare, V. B., et. al. (2013), Zoeckler, Jeanette M (2017) and Ning Li et al. (2018). Survey studies always have reliability issues and misunderstanding of the statements. However, with the C-alpha statistics indicate with sound internal consistency, the reliability problems were mitigated. The staff at the agricultural research sector perceive moderate job stress that effects the psychological well-being and performance. Flexi working time, improving peer relations, peer support, family support will mitigate the stress. The organization should be responsible for having stress mitigating efforts such as meditation, yoga and exercises, social gatherings to improve the psychological well-being of employees